KEY POINTS:
Strange, isn't it, that match racing is almost non-existent in New Zealand these days. It's 82 years since we saw the last one in galloping.
That fact was driven home by the Changeover-Gotta Go Cullen harness match-up at Cambridge on Thursday night.
That is, after all, how horse racing began. It's the purest form of equine competition.
The Melbourne Cups and Derbies of today had their origin in Lord So And So, with too much time and money, convincing Dan Downandout, full of testosterone and not much else, to race his horse over a set course for a pot of gold that one could afford and the other desperately wanted to get his hands on.
A couple of centuries later not much has changed - there is still a host of owners with a $10,000 horse and the world's biggest owner, Godolphin, trying to win a Melbourne Cup.
The earliest match race in Australia was somewhere around the 1830s when one of the protagonists, closely related to the recently imported English criminal stock, successfully waged 110 guineas on himself around what is now Sydney's Centennial Park.
There was a ban on drinking and gambling on the day, but that was never going to stop an Aussie.
It was seven years after the end of World War I that New Zealand saw it's last match race between two great gallopers, Gloaming and The Hawk in the Ormond Memorial Gold Cup at Hastings.
It wasn't set out as a match race but the two other acceptors withdrew to give the race a real sting.
Gloaming was a remarkable horse. He had 67 starts for 57 wins and nine seconds and in the other race the open barrier strand wrapped itself around his legs and he was pulled up after nearly falling.
But he was 10 in the mid 1920s when he faced the much younger The Hawk, whose sprinting form in Australia had been brilliant.
Great rider Hector Gray on The Hawk decided to put pressure on Gloaming's old legs from the start, but before a massive crowd the veteran's big heart proved too much and he beat The Hawk by one length in race record time. They talked about that race for decades.
Racing administrators should perhaps keep a weather eye on an opportunity to replicate that scenario.
